Conversation by a Burning Bed

Author's note:

I recently read a story here in LW about a couple who had been married for many happy years. Then the wife meets a much younger man and is irresistibly drawn to him. They have sex, just one long afternoon of fucking. Some days later, guilt causes her to confess the affair to her husband. He is outraged, but in the end is convinced in therapy and by his wife to forgive her and even to treat her young lover with civility.

Oh, hell, no. I was pissed. This was the worst kind of RAAC. The guilty are not punished in any way. Only the wronged husband suffers.

I have provided below my modest attempt, which can be read as an alternate ending or an immediate sequel, to rehabilitate the husband and to reattach his scrotum by letting him BTB.

**********

He came in the front door on Saturday morning, shutting it loudly behind him, and went directly to the stairs. He did not acknowledge his wife sitting in the front room. Startled, she rose abruptly, spilling red wine all over the arm of her shirt and the wood floor.

Not too long before, he would have been worried about the stain and the fact that she was drinking at eleven o'clock in the morning.

Now he just didn't give a shit.

"Honey," she said, ignoring the wetness on her arm in her rush to intercept him. "Where have you been?"

It had been three days since he gathered some clothes and left their house. He had ghosted her since, not returning her texts or answering her calls.

He took the stairs in pairs and went into their bedroom. He contemplated the neatly made bed, shook his head, and picked up the mattress by one side.

King mattresses are heavy as fuck, he thought. This one doubly so. He had to think about something else to bring himself to even touch it, but he was soon dragging it out into the hall and pointing it down the stairs.

"Honey--" she said pleadingly. It looked like she wanted to take his arm but held back.

He slid the mattress down the staircase, his maniacal energy the only way he was able to shift the mass. He grunted as he manhandled it out the back door, down the porch steps, and into the garden.

He pulled it past the planting beds and out into the field beyond where he finally allowed the monolithic bastard to pancake to earth in a big puff of dust. He put his hands on his knees and panted for a minute, then he went to the shed and grabbed a container of gasoline.

He poured about a pint onto the mattress and searched his pockets for the matchbook. He didn't smoke, so the book of matches had been a deliberate purchase. Worth the dime.

"Wh-- what are you doing?" his wife asked. He had never heard that tone in her voice before. She was afraid of him.

He frowned. Twenty-five years of holy matrimony. Never a cross word or a raised hand, and now she was afraid?

Too little. Too late.

"I'm burning this damn mattress," he said, rather cheerfully. "I thought that would have been obvious by now." He had finally found and held the matches aloft.

She cried out as if in pain. "But... why?"

"Because he fucked you on this mattress. And he fucked you in the shower, but tile doesn't burn."

He opened the matches and tried to pick one out. In spite of his confident manner of speaking, his hands trembled.

She could not help it. She had to say it. "Do you know how much that cost?"

He tore out a paper strip, red-ended and dangerous-looking. He stepped back from the gasoline fumes rolling across the alfalfa stubble and struck it against the black of the book. It flared.

"I know exactly how much this mattress cost. One marriage."

He flung the tiny yellow flame at the thing he used to find rest and joy and comfort on and the air above it exploded into flame. A vigorous mushroom cloud of flame and gas and white. Quickly the fire found the foam below and the smoke became black and acrid.

She retreated until her legs bumped into a bale of hay and she sat down, staring at the roaring fire.

"I don't think that can hurt us anymore," he said, laughing with no humor in it.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks. "Why?"

He drew himself up as tall as he could manage.

"Why? Did you really just ask me why?"

She nodded slowly.

"Oh, I don't know. Let me see. Was it because you gave your cunt to a boy not much older than our son? Was it because you let him fuck you unprotected in the bed of a happily married couple? Was it because you lied about it over and over? Stop me when any of these ring a bell, dear."

"I didn't lie."

"No, technically you did not directly lie to me. But did you come to me immediately and say, oh husband of mine, I have made a terrible error in judgement and I need your forgiveness?"

She shook her head.

"That's right. You did not. And would you be fucking him still if I had not guessed something was wrong with you? With us?"

She made no movement.

"Ah, there it is. I can read you after twenty-five years of intimacy, dear. You would be in this bed with him right this minute -- under different circumstances, of course." He pointed to the flames.

She dropped her head.

"Look at me!" He snapped. "Do me the courtesy of hearing me out. I sat in therapy and listened to your story and your excuses over and over."

She held her head up defiantly and looked him in the eyes.

"I listened to you tell the therapist that the sex with the guy was great. Well, dear, if you admitted it was great, that really meant it was off the chart fantastic. The best you ever had. Am I right?"

She made no move, just glared at him.

"AM I RIGHT?" he roared, making her jump.

She gave in imperceptible nod.

"Okay," he said. "And you want to work this out. Reconcile. Go back to the way we were before?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes. I do. I love you. I want only you."

"Don't. I can see it in your face. I heard it in your voice at therapy. You're totally infatuated with this guy. Head over heels. I don't like it, but it is there. You love him. I don't know why. I'm not sure I want to know why. Let us get this clear, then. You want me to live the rest of my life with you knowing that I am second best?"

Her face fell.

"You promised me in therapy that it was over," he said. "You would never do it again. But we both know that is a lie. The next time he gets near you your brain will fog up and your wet little twat will call out for him."

She did not deny that, as hard as she wanted to try, as desperately as she wanted to make her husband believe it. She could not even make herself believe it.

"Wife of mine, you don't know men very well at all. You do know how to shake your tits at a college kid and get him to whip his dick out. That doesn't take much insight."

"I'm not going to sit here--" She began to get up.

"You will damn well sit there until I am done," he said. He did not even raise his voice, but the way he said it made his wife drop back into her seat.

"How could it even have entered your brain that you could fuck a man in my bed and I would somehow overcome that? That makes me think that you don't know me at all. And here I was looking forward to growing old with you in our home." He made a sweeping gesture to take in the ranch, their house, the whole valley.

She began to sob again.

"Can you guess the worst thing? The very worst thing in the whole shitpile of badness? The single fact that doomed our marriage? The thing that might have saved it?"

This made her come to attention.

"It was this: If you had fucked the guy spontaneously, say met him at a party and just was overcome with irrational desire and dropped your panties for him before your brain could tell you it was a bad idea? That would have been horrible for me, but I would have had a chance to think about forgiving that. But you knew the guy for two months. You admitted to the therapist that you had been having sexual thoughts about him since the first day you met."

Her head had dropped back down, but he was tired of yelling at her. What the hell good would it do. He just went on in a weary acceptance of reality.

"No. You thought about fucking him for two months. You said there was something irresistible about him that made you have to have his prick inside you. You said it was like you lost control over yourself. I know you love me. I know you love our kids and this ranch and our marriage. But two months you thought about fucking him. You had two whole long months to think about what fucking him would do to us. Two months where I kissed you every day and slept with you every night - while your mind and your cunt was distracted by thoughts of fucking him. Then you chose a few hours of his cock in your hole over twenty-five years of us."

She nodded. It could not be denied.

"Even then. Even then! If you had just fucked him once. Once. And if you had jumped up after that one time and ran to find me to tell me you had done something horrible -- we still might have had a chance to overcome this. But you fucked him again, then you took the time to get in the shower with him. And fuck him in the shower. That was cruel. It was intentional. You had swept me and your love for me completely aside. I am amazed that you think it came back. I am amazed that even a sliver of me believes you when you say that you love me right now."

He shook his head. "And you have the gall to tell me we can work past this? Be husband and wife again? Jesus wept, woman. How could you expect a man to have sex with you after that?"

She looked at him, questions on her face. "But we have...."

"Yes, we have. In the guest room. I could not bear to have this piece of shit touch me." He gestured toward the inferno. "And you don't realize that every time I see your naked cunt I can see his cock going in and out of it. I can see his cum seeping from you. For fuck's sake, every time I forced myself to go down on you these past weeks I have felt like vomiting. A couple of times I ran to the bathroom, telling you that I had to pee. I was puking. And when I fuck you, I have to think of other women to stay hard."

She was shocked. "I had no idea...."

"It's not like your cunt was any different than it used to be. It survived just fine. The only thing damaged was the trust we used to have in each other. That got broken. Can't fix that. Never. I thought I was your one and only. Then I find out I am just another man in line."

The conflagration was a steady crackling red now. A black pillar rose up into the clear blue sky. He walked around the periphery, stomping out small flames trying to escape into the dry alfalfa stubble.

"I spoke to him yesterday," he said. He kept one eye on his wife's response to that. She looked up with a little too much eagerness. "At the college."

He knew she wanted to yell at him WHAT DID HE SAY? WHAT DID YOU TELL HIM?

"I stopped him on his way to class. Nobody heard us. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing fucking another man's wife. He was angry and tried to push past me, but I kept in front of him. I thought he was going to swing on me. He figured out fast that would have gone badly for him."

She put one hand to her mouth. Her husband was not a big man, but he was rancher hard, muscles developed from long days of tossing hay bales and wrestling calves. Her lover was beautiful but lean. It would not have been a fair fight.

"I recommended that he keep an eye out. Just friendly advice. Word of his actions has gone out in the valley. The ranching community here watches out for each other, and they all carry rifles. It would be a shame to have his promising academic career cut short by a hunting accident."

She gasped. "You asshole. He did nothing to deserve that."

"Dear, I love you still, but fuck you. And fuck him. He deserved it the minute he failed to push you away, to tell you that you were a married woman and an honorable man would not be fucking a married woman. A round to the head would be too quick. I would not shed a tear if he died in agony. Slowly."

"You don't mean that."

"I mean every word of it. He destroyed my life. He destroyed a happy marriage. He has to pay, one way or another. I was kind enough to suggest that he transfer to another school far away and never come back. It could be better for his health."

"I can't believe this," she cried.

"Well, welcome to my world, where I could not believe that the woman who pledged her loyalty to me forever tossed me away like so much trash just by spreading her legs. Be careful, dear. Those legs are powerful. You open them at the wrong time and a man's heart is broken. And another man dies."

She opened her mouth wide but made no sound.

"You said in therapy that you didn't see why I could not forgive and forget. The therapist did kind of encourage that stupidity when he said that many men could come to terms with what you had done and find love again."

She nodded expectantly.

"I am not that man. Never have been. Never will be. If you did not know that, then there is no goddamn relationship to salvage. You have an image of me in your head that is untrue. Maybe you are desperate to save our marriage, to save our ranch, and that blinds you to reality. You did this--" he nodded to the blaze "--the instant your pants came off."

She stared into the fire and wiped her eyes.

He reached behind him and took two folded over brown envelopes from where he had tucked them into his belt. He walked over to her and dropped them on the ground at her feet.

"Have your lawyer look these over and then sign the one you want."

"I don't need a lawyer," she sobbed. "I will do anything you want me to do."

"You are not as stupid as that. You just did one stupid thing. Unfortunately for us, it was the one stupid thing you could not take back."

She reluctantly picked up the envelopes.

"There are two options for you," he said. "The first option is that we sell the property. House, fields, equipment, everything, and split the money 50:50. You lose the house, the gardens, the horses. You can't afford the place by yourself."

She opened her mouth in horror. "Can't we please--?

"No! We cannot! Now, I know how much you love this place. I love it too, with all my heart. We bought it and built it up. We raised three wonderful kids here. So the second option lets you keep it all."

She looked up eagerly. "How?'

"If you choose and sign the second option, you get the property and all of our cash reserves and savings. I get the stocks. It comes out to be about a 90:10 split in your favor. Enough to keep and run this place. But...."

She eyed him suspiciously.

"But," he continued. "My lawyer put in terms. If you should meet the guy again, if you call him, if you write him a postcard, if you have any contact with him in any form, then the property is put up for sale and the first option is back in play. This valley is full of my friends, and they will keep a close eye on you."

Her face crumpled in abject misery.

"That's right, dear. He is your first choice. Don't try to deny it. I hope that I am at least your second choice. If you want to keep this place, then both of those choices are taken away from you. That is your punishment. You have to admit it beats a thirty aught six round to the brain."

She began to sob. He relished the idea of her being tormented by a choice between the heat of her new lover and her desire to keep the family home.

"Please, dear," she wailed. Snot was flowing from her nose, tears from her eyes. "Please don't do this. I am so sorry. I will never--"

He cut her off. "You already proved yourself a liar. You lied when you promised to be faithful to me. You remember that day. You were dressed in white. I can never again believe what you say to me, so don't try to bargain or make promises. It's over."

She found a new gear of grief. She lost control of her muscles and fell over onto the ground.

He wanted to pick her up, to hold her and dry her tears and tell her it would be okay. Twenty-five years of being best friends, of sleeping next to each other, of changing diapers and boiling noodles and wiping noses. He wanted that all back.

But it was not okay and never again would be. It was not coming back.

"Part of me hopes that you find a new man, someone special. Someone that you come to love with all your soul. And I hope that he cheats on you and it tears you to pieces. Another part of me wants you to be happy. Just-- when you do find a new love--"

He looked off across the field.

"--try to think with your head instead of your cunt."

She raised her head from the ground. He was looking across the field again. Down the road on the other side of the fence came a blue pickup. It stopped and a woman got out. Blonde. Even from this distance obviously younger than her husband.

"Who is that?' she squeaked.

"None of your business anymore," he said. He started walking across the field towards the truck.

"Where... where are you going?" she cried.

He stopped. "I'm going away. I will give the kids my contact information, but don't you try to use it. I never want to hear from you again. I plan to get laid. And get fucked and fucked and fucked until whatever it is that runs from my cock to my head to my heart gets fucked clean of you. Maybe the pain will go away."

She scrabbled to a sitting position. "And then will you come back?"

He laughed harshly and motioned to the mattress, still burning merrily away.

"What do you think?"